1 post tagged “central park hoodie”
This is the extremely popular Central Park Hoodie sweater. I have had this sweater pattern in the queue since I very first started knitting. The ladies in the Ravelry group for my local yarn store decided back in June or July that they were going to do a knit-a-long of this sweater, so I figured that was my golden opportunity to make it and I joined in.
This is by far the most complicated and ambitious project that I've taken on to date and had I let myself read the entire pattern at one time, I probably would have run screaming away. The nice thing about doing it as a knit-a-long is that the project was split out into small parts to be knit over a two week period (ie. knit the back the first two weeks, knit the two fronts the second two weeks, etc), so I focused only on what I had to do in the current two weeks and forgot about the rest. It made the pattern much more managable.
This sweater has a reputation of fitting snuggly, so I was planning on going up a size to a size 44". When I did my gauge swatch, my gauge was too small when knitting with the recommended size 8 needles. If I went up a needle size, I was just slightly big on gauge and I didn't like how the bigger stitches looked. I did some calculations and figured out that if I made the size 48" with my smaller gauge, that it would end up just slightly bigger than the size 44". I was a little nervous about the sizing, but I'm very happy with how the finished sweater fits.
Since I started this sweater back in July when I didn't have my regular grad student paycheck, I had to be frugal when I chose the yarn for it. I went with Knit Picks' Wool of the Andes in the Thyme colorway. I'm pleased with the yarn. It is a bit scratchy, but I'll always have a t-shirt on under this sweater. The stitch definition is really nice and I love the color. I calculated that it would take me exactly 15 balls to make the sweater, so I ordered 15 balls. Then I woke up in the middle of the night and panicked that I hadn't ordered any extra, so I ordered 2 more balls the next morning. It took exactly 15 balls to finish the sweater. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the other 2 balls.
I was so proud of myself for finishing this sweater, I thought without any major errors. Then this afternoon when I was uploading the pictures of it to the internet, I noticed, for the first time, the horribly obvious miscrossed cable on the back of the left shoulder. I was hoping that it would be covered up when the hood was down, but unfortunately, it's not.
I'm just glad that it's on the back where I won't be able to see it all the time. I'm still extremely pleased with the sweater, even with the miscrossed cable. I think it's going to become a winter staple for me. One last picture of this one. The double cable up the sleeve is my favorite part of the sweater and is what made me fall in love with the pattern in the first place.
I'm a little burnt out on big projects with lots of seaming and fitting to be done. I'd love to just work on some small projects for a while, but I promised my daughter I would make her a sweater after I finished up mine. She turned her nose up at all of the simple seamless knit from the top down sweaters that I suggested and chose a cabled sweater that is knit in peices. I'll be swatching for gauge tonight.
